Interviews

Face-to-face interviews were conducted using structured questionnaire to collect information on the knowledge, attitudes and practices of the food-handlers on food safety. The questionnaire was peer-reviewed and pilot tested in three institutions in the Upper East Region of Ghana, before a final version was administered to food-handlers. Participants were interviewed by the researchers and trained research assistants using the structured questionnaire. Data was collected between December 2014 and June 2015.

The questionnaire was structured into five distinctive sections. Section one was to collect information on respondents’ demographic characteristics such as gender, age, level of education and length of employment in the food service business. Section two was concerned with information on the employees’ work satisfaction while sections 3, 4 and 5 were concerned with information on employees’ knowledge of food safety, attitude towards food safety and food hygiene practices respectively.

Questions pertaining to demographic information of respondents and employees’ work satisfaction were adapted from Soares et al. [22] and Jevšnik et al. [16]. Answers were graded on a scale of five, with 1 indicating “strongly disagree” and five indicating “strongly agree”. Questions on food safety knowledge, attitudes and practices were adapted from previously published works [13, 22–24].

The section of questionnaire dealing with food safety knowledge comprised 25 close-ended questions with three possible answers; “true”, “false”, and “do not know”. These questions specifically dealt with respondents’ knowledge of personal hygiene, cross contamination, food-borne diseases, microorganisms, temperature control and hygienic practices. A scale ranging between 0 and 24 (representing the total number of questions on food safety knowledge) was used to evaluate the overall knowledge of respondents. Food-handlers that obtained total score ≤16 points were considered to have “insufficient” knowledge and those that had scores ≥17 points (≥68% accuracy) were considered to have “good” knowledge of food safety.

Questions pertaining to attitudes (section 4) were aimed at determining the understanding of food-handlers about food safety. Here, attitudes was used to mean “a complex mental state involving beliefs, feelings, values and dispositions to act in certain ways” [19]. This section had 20 statements/questions that required three possible responses: “agree”, “disagree”, and “don’t know or remember”. For evaluation, food-handlers that answered to 13 or less statements/questions correctly were measured to have “insufficient or poor” understanding, whereas those that responded to 14 or more statements/questions correctly were measured to have “good” understanding.

In section five, which dealt with food hygiene practices, the good hygienic practices of respondents (institutional food-handlers) were assessed and evaluated based on self-reporting of personal hygiene and other safe food handling practices. The section had 11 statements/questions with two possible responses: “yes”, and “no”. Each correct practice reported scored one (1) point. For evaluation, a score ≥ 70% by an individual respondent was considered as having “good” food hygienic practice.